Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Hakimian is skeptical: “The women newscasters on TV still wear head scarves; the country barely accepts that they show their faces. If you can’t show a woman’s hair, how can you show her in a boy’s arms?” But Zamzama countered, “No fighting films. We’ve seen enough guns in our real lives. People should enjoy the new Afghan films.” She gestured extravagantly. “It’s time for fun, fun, fun.”

Music Breaks a Silence

While cultural resurgence in all the arts is strong, it is most striking in music. A long-silenced country, where women could be arrested for humming to their babies, where it was illegal even to clap your hands, is suddenly full of every kind of music in every place.

I went to a wedding where the band was playing in a very un-Western “Western style”—what for Afghanistan would have been Top 40 if anyone had been counting. A member of the groom’s family had died a short time earlier, and there is supposed to be no music after such a death; but the bride protested that there had been enough years of silence to cover a thousand family deaths. The band included an electric guitar, a drum machine, and a Soviet-era synthesizer; the irregular electricity meant that all the instruments kept going on and off, and the performance was undistinguished, but people were overjoyed by the music. They spoke of little else. My favorite song had these lyrics:

Sweetheart, put on your makeup and perfume.

Be beautiful.

Your eyes are like a deer

Your lips, like a pomegranate flower,

And your height, like a tree.

Oh, I am going to my sweetheart

And I don’t know whether to go

In a Datsun, a minivan, or a Land Rover.

The progenitors of up-to-the-minute Afghan pop are somewhat more urbane. Baktash Kamran is as close to a pop star as you’ll find in Afghanistan—good-looking, twenty-three years old, a bodybuilder, a reinterpreter of music from the seventies and creator of new material. On the several occasions when I met him, he wore a leather jacket with an American flag on the back. During the time of the Taliban, he dug out a secret underground basement room, where he practiced music, far enough down so that they couldn’t hear him. He was an adolescent and a provocateur who was jailed four times: for keeping his beard too well trimmed on one occasion and for having an electric piano on another. He claims he was singing as he escaped.

The first singer to have his own concert on Afghan television after it was reestablished, Kamran showed me the object that he calls his pride and joy: a high-tech Yamaha synthesizer that he brought into the country from Pakistan when the Taliban still controlled the south. “I couldn’t bring it across the legal checkpoints,” he explained, “so I tied it to a donkey and he and I climbed the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan together. Then I wrapped it in a shawl and carried it to Kabul in a taxi.”

Asked about relations between the sexes, the subject of his songs, he said they were getting closer, but added that he had never felt excluded by the burka. “It’s easy to fall in love with a pair of shoes,” he told me. “Or the way someone’s fabric moves.” He has written songs about that.

While this scene is brewing, music is also reentering the lives of people for whom it is a more profound enterprise. On Thursdays, the eve of the Sabbath, the Chishti Sufi people of Afghanistan, Muslim mystics, are gathering once again for the ritual that the Taliban so long denied them. I went to a recently reestablished khanqah, a Sufi holy building, in Kabul. The ceremony took place in the poorest part of the city, down a long alley of bombed-out buildings. I climbed a small staircase of mud bricks into a hidden upper story where about eighty men were seated on old carpets strewn across the floor. The walls were graffitied with phrases from the Koran, and the light came from candles and one electric light, which went on and off according to its whim.

The men had faces from outside of time: craggy and bearded, though some were quite young, and aflame with the ceremony. They wore traditional Afghan dress, heavy woolen shawls wrapped completely around them. On a raised platform, about a half dozen instrumentalists were playing strange lyrical music and incanting verses, repetitive and mesmeric. Periodically one would stop, and someone else would take his place. The crowd swayed and shifted to the music, and some intoned nasally with the singers. A young man with a battered teapot crawled around serving everyone tea from the same eight cups. The ceremony went on all night. It was dizzying; time lost its meaning. Sometimes someone would get up and dance or sway ecstatically. The voices would rise and grow thick in the air. Then the tune would become increasingly rapid, the rhythms more urgent, until it broke, and a new tune would make its slow way forward. It felt sacred and as ancient as the seven hundred years that it has been practiced by Sufis in Afghanistan.